Bloggers defeat Nikki Haley and The State Newspaper

I cannot take full credit for this, not with Will Folks and Logan Smith doing admirable jobs covering the story as well, and not with people on Facebook, Freethoughtblogs, and Reddit being the ones who kept the story alive and sent people to my website. You guys are incredible, way to use the net for good and awesome.

At least 20,000 people were informed from my site alone of The State choosing to unpublish a story because Governor Nikki Haley asked them to. This doesn’t include all the people who saw the headline and never clicked the link, which I’m sure is a huge number as well. The state treasurer’s office got in touch with me just to reach out and say they saw the post. Just a hey, how’s it going, saw your post, we’re cool.

What does The State have to say?

A draft of this article — identified as not ready for publication — improperly was published last week on websites in Rock Hill and Charlotte, and in the printed edition of the Rock Hill newspaper. Rock Hill and Charlotte are “sister” publications to The State, operating inside a common computer system that allows each to see what the other is writing. At the time, the article was being held so The State could pursue answers to additional questions.

Weirdly enough, the last info they seem to have gotten is from a full week ago. Oh well, better late than never, right?

The good thing is that I’m not a gloater. Because if one was to gloat, I’d have to be all BAM, take that jerks! What’s up now? Yeah!

Comments

(1) Nepotism exists in business. We all know it exists in business. Nevertheless, it is not something to hold up as a Good Thing, and should be deliberately, explicitly avoided by elected officials. Isn’t it their JOB to act in the best interest of the people they represent? Wouldn’t it be in a politician’s best interest to keep their family’s employment as disconnected from their own as possible? Public opinion being kind of important to their own livelihood and all that…

(2) “I admire the little girl for wanting to have a job,” said state Sen. Jake Knotts, R-Lexington, a frequent Haley critic. “More youth should be like her. … I don’t have a problem with the governor trying to help her immediate family.” Here we go again: yep, all those unemployed youth are unemployed because they’re just too lazy/unmotivated to get/keep a(n “unadvertised”) job. Uh-huh.

When ‘helping your immediate family’ comes at the expense of others – like, say, others who are just as or more qualified for a job, but happen to be outside your immediate family – at the very least you should be doing some cost/benefit analysis at a broader scale. There’s nothing stopping such folks (i.e. in positions to hire their family members) from ‘helping’ their children with advice and informal training, with encouragement to find and hold a job on their own merits, while not denying the same opportunities to others. And those who purportedly work to advance the public interest should know better.

This really strikes me as one of those situations where the cover-up is worse than the transgression. While we do want to hold our elected officials to higher standards, getting a teenage kid a summer job at one’s workplace is pretty common. If she didn’t violate any specific rules about hiring, I think that story alone would have blown over.

But even the slightest hint of quashing the story in the press is a huge deal. You can’t make bad press disappear in this day and age and any attempt to do so will just make you look much worse than the actual story.

30 hours sounds a bit close to a full time job for a teenager – this is clearly outright nepotism, and nepotism from a politician of the small government variety no less. No surprise though, government workers are leeches except when they’re your own family, then they are ‘harder working’ than those teenagers who can’t seem to score the same deal out in the private sector.

For well connected kids, the ‘summer job’ is basically valuable experience from whom less privileged kids are permanently shut out, handed to you without having to actually compete on the basis of merit.

I think there are rules in place that government jobs must be advertised – at least there are in Illinois (I worked for the State here for a while) and positions had to be posted, and there were also rules that all candidates who had appropriate qualifications had to actually get interviews; they couldn’t like the first person to walk in and then just decide to not give the rest a chance.

There were also rules in place against people having relatives as supervisors, but this was Illinois, I don’t know about the rest of the US.

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